Proceedings of the British Academy, 237, 189–202, © The British Academy 2021. 12 A New Generation of Disappearances: Gangs and the State in El Salvador MARÍA JOSÉ MÉNDEZ Two competing perspectives emerge in El Salvador regarding disappearances. From the top-down perspective held by Salvadoran authorities, the arbitrary arrest and disappearance of Yovani and Samuel by soldiers – captured in Wilson’s narrative testimony (Chapter 11) – is an exception rather than the norm. 1 Those authorities claim that most disappearances are carried out by gang members who have learned that ‘without a body there is no crime’, the logic of the clandestine act examined in Chapter 1. 2 A bottom-up perspective arises from the everyday lived experience on the peripheries of El Salvador. From this experience, Yovani and Samuel’s disappearance is not viewed as an isolated case. It instead refects the patterns of state abuse of authority leading to disappearances and posing obstacles to families searching for their disappeared relatives. These two perspectives are set out in this chapter. 3 1 All names of relatives of the disappeared have been changed to protect the anonymity of individuals. The narrative is based on an interview I conducted with ‘Wilson’ on 7 May 2018, in San Salvador, El Salvador. I received oral permission from Wilson to publish this interview on the condition of anonymity on 7 May 2018. 2 According to Carcach and Artola (2016: 3), the Mara Salvatrucha and Barrio 18 (which consists of two factions: Sureños and Revolucionarios) turned to the clandestine burial of their victims in response to the Salvadoran government’s crime control policy. They also suggest that gangs use disappearances for the purpose of social control and to demand political concessions for incarcerated gang members. The use of disappearances as a political strategy became the most evident in 2012 when Mara Salvatrucha and Barrio 18 reached a government-backed truce that led to a drastic reduction in homicides in exchange for government concessions such as prison transfers. Investigations revealed that the drop in homicides was partly the result of the gangs’ decision to conceal bodies (Cruz and Durán-Martínez 2016). 3 This chapter draws upon qualitative research involving 25 semi-structured interviews with relatives of the disappeared, government offcials, journalists, human rights defenders, and NGO practitioners. These interviews took place in San Salvador, El Salvador, in 2018. Beyond these interviews, the study draws on institutional information about disappearances obtained from the National Civil Police (PNC), Institute of Legal Medicine (IML), and the General Prosecutor’s Offce (FGR), through the Salvadoran